Read our last blog post for Plastic Free July, focusing on the negative effects that plastic has on our health. 

For all the apparent convenience plastic brought to some people’s lives for so many years, it has now begun to blow back on us. Not only has it caused harm to vital biodiversity and our climate, but it’s in us now as well. Climate change and biodiversity loss have their own negative impacts on human health, but people are also ingesting plastic directly now, with harm to health obtaining. Researchers from Australia’s University of Newcastle estimated in 2019 that the average person may have been ingesting five grams of microplastic per week, about as much as a credit card.

Just why is this bad? Plastics contain hundreds of chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer, behavioural, and other kinds of ailments. Many of these chemicals do not pass through the environment easily; they are persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Dioxins—a group of chemicals including 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo para dioxin (TCDD)—are among the most toxic, longest-lasting POPs. TCDD, the “classic” dioxin, is a “known human carcinogen” according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is an ingredient in Agent Orange, which gained notoriety for its ecocidal and carcinogenic effects in the American invasion of Vietnam.

Dioxins are probably the most odious and easiest to hate toxins in plastics today, but some less damaging substances are also present. For example, phthalates, which are added to toys and intravenous bags for their softening and stretching properties and to cosmetics as solvents, have been “linked … with a range of health impacts, including reproductive disorders, [becoming] overweight, insulin resistance, asthma, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” Bisphenols, found in things like plastic bottles, dental fillings, and thermal paper, correlate with “breast cancer, infertility, early puberty, epidemics such as diabetes and obesity, and neurological disorders in children.” Even though many flame retardants have been banned, a Swedish study says almost every living human has them in their bloodstream today. Europeans aren’t “clean” of them, merely less contaminated than we in Turtle Island–North America. Some of the most toxic flame retardants (polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, and hexabromocyclohexane, HBCD), which are added to a raft of plastic products, relate to hormone disruption, behavioural issues, lowered IQ, cancer, and reproductive troubles.

Some of the effects of plastic consumption are different in manifestation, magnitude, or sometimes both depending on your demographics. For men or people assigned male at birth, there are an estimated 328.44 micrograms of plastic per gram in the average human testicle, nearly triple the ratio of what has obtained in dog testicles and contributed to declining sperm counts. For women or people assigned female at birth, breast cancer, endometriosis, menstrual irregularity, miscarriages, ovarian cancer, and polycystic ovarian syndrome are all associated with exposure to the petrochemicals from which humans make plastic. (Breast cancer in younger women is commonly associated with greater exposure to plastic chemicals, as well as the pollutants that climate change touches off.) According to Robert DeMatteo and coauthors, this reflects how class is feminized: women work the exposed jobs in production at much higher rates than men.

Another common connection between poverty and exposure to the harmful chemicals of plastic is in the racial dimension. The Aamjiwnaang First Nation is near Sarnia, Ontario, the site of a great deal of petrochemical (and thus plastic) production. A 2005 study found that male-identifiable births declined in a statistically significant way from 1994 to 2003. Baskut Tuncak, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Toxics, visited several sites in Canada in 2019. In his report the following year, he pointed to the deleterious impacts of pollution on the rights of all people. Paragraph seventeen sums up the case:

Pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals threaten the right to life, and a life with dignity, where environmental degradation threatens or causes poisoning of persons or communities, poses health challenges, and violates their opportunities to maintain bodily integrity.

This is not at all to suggest that the answer is to impose the same level of harm on male, female, White, Brown, Black, and Indigenous communities. The correct level of exposure to pollution is zero whatever your demographics. We need a just transition that gives everyone work that creates benefits for humans and the biosphere.

For all the research that has been done, more still needs doing. This past January, the federal government announced $2.1 million in funding for researchers at McGill University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and the University of Toronto to investigate how exposure to environmental microplastics affects human health. Some of their findings will apply more to their parts of eastern Canada than to us in Manitoba, though it does tie into one theme of the federal government’s plastics science agenda promulgated in 2018.

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This blog was written by Mike Bagamery, an Environmental Researcher residing on Treaty 1 Territory.